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It’s good to have one

Plan B

Plan B
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I’ve a rule and that’s to always have plan B no matter how certain particular path, project or goal is. I’ve a few good reasons why I do that.
 
Sometimes I hear “back to the drawing board” and I’m surprised that developing plan B is not commonplace. In my world, there should always be a plan B.
 
Plan B forces me to develop alternative options. I learn a lot from those alternative options and often can improve plan A as well just by developing them.
 
Plan B also helps me to evaluate plan A. Sometimes I figure out that plan A shouldn’t be plan A at all.
 
Plan B enables me to change tacks when plan A fails. This is the most obvious one of course.
 
But the biggest one is that if I can’t develop a viable believable plan B, there’s something odd about plan A. That’s the most valuable lesson here. If there is no plan B than plan A is wrong. It should always be possible to develop plan B and preferably you could come up with plan C, D, etc. If you find it hard or impossible to do, you should seriously think of plan A. It might not be the best plan you’ve ever had.

Keep your eye on the prize

The path is never straight

The path is never straight
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One of the things, I’ve learned with running startups is that the path to any strategic goal is never straight. It looks good on paper, but in reality, there was always bumps on the road or setbacks on the negative side and creative solutions and new insights on the positive side.
 
If you’re too rigid in your execution, setbacks and bumps are problems and delay your execution while you’re blind to potential interesting and novel solutions to problems.
 
I always try to keep an open mind and be flexible on execution while keeping my eye on the target. We should always try to move forward and come closer to the overall goal, but rarely you walk down the path you set out for yourself and that’s ok.
 
With this mindset, there’s even value to be found in setbacks. You learn from them and you adapt. The problems you never go away, but with an open mind you can change tacks and get to your goal regardless. It’s less exhausting too.

Classification is more flexible than folder organization

Digital archive and tags

Digital archive and tags
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There used to be a time I meticulously kept a contact list, but nowadays when I need to reach someone I spoke with before, the information is at my fingertips. I stopped maintaining my contact list a long time. Now I just search.
 
This was never a conscious decision but it kind of happened. I do keep meticulous digital records of everything, but I no longer organize them as meticulously as I did in the past.
 
I scan receipts with my phone and put them in a folder on my Dropbox. Documents either live in Google Docs or on Dropbox in a generic folder. Contact information lives in my email and calendar.
 
Search has really changed the game for surfacing content which we used to find using an organization like folders and lists.
 
My dream would be that I can just dump everything into the cloud and not even figure out where to put something – not even a generic folder. The problem is that you do need be to surface a document which means you’ve to think a little about classification. Today this means a top level or secondary level folder and the filename. But those are proxies for what I really want and that’s something like tagging. I love to be able to just classify anything based on a few tags and no longer think about filenames and folders.
 
Tagging has been tried before by Google in both their Gmail – they still call it tags but they operate like folders – and Docs products. They tracked back from that because people found it confusing.
 
Maybe now the time has come to revisit that again. People’s behavior changes over time and they were really early. I can imagine it could be an overlay to the current folder structure where people have a choice and are not forced to use it.
 
If you let go of structural organization and rely on search, tags make so much more sense than anything else. Here’s to hoping.

The heartbeat of a company

Cadence

Cadence
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If you release products, it’s good to have a cadence in your company. The cadence is a regular interval to bring products to market. Apple is famous for it with their yearly cadence on releases of most of their products. Also interesting to note that when an Apple product isn’t on a cadence like their MacBook line, the products aren’t as good as their other products.
 
Cadence is company and product-specific. Apple’s one time per year cadence works for them but doesn’t necessarily work for others. Everyone should determine what their own cadence is.
 
Another example is Ubuntu – the Linux distribution. When Ubuntu started, they announced they would release a new version every six months. Initially, they got a flack for that because in general, the consensus at the time was “it’s done when it’s done.” You see that a lot in engineering-driven organizations. But Ubuntu pulled it off and other open source projects have followed suit.
 
Microsoft was famous for not having a cadence at all. They suffered from that though. Windows Longhorn which ultimately turned into Windows Vista took a long time to come to market and development was even “reset” mid-way to limit feature creep and expectations. For Windows 10, Microsoft finally went on a bi-annual cadence.
 
Cadence is important for a few reasons. First, it gives the company a clear goal – we release on a particular date. Second, from this set goal, we get two things; predictability and focused decision making.
 
Predictability is helpful because it sets expectations about what to expect for everyone involved. From your own staff, your suppliers and customers, everyone can adapt to your cadence and there are no surprises. Any part of your organization can gear up to launch and there is no discussion on when that’s going to happen. Instead, everyone can focus on what the launch entails. Nobody is caught off-guard except from a dropped feature or two, but that’s ok since the focus was solely on the scope anyway.
 
Cadence also focuses on decision making because it takes a variable out of the equation. Development takes time and often it is hard to accurately predict the time necessary to develop a feature or product. By taking out time, you relieve a lot of pressure to deliver. This may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s easier to decide if something is in or out when the cut-off time is not under consideration. You can then focus solely on the cost and the scope which is often a more healthy discussion.
 
I recommend anyone in a product-driven organization to consider cadence. There is no right or wrong in the interval and it depends on the product which cadence makes sense. Even companies like Supercell famous for their Clash genre of games has monthly updates.

Growing your startup

Separation of responsibilities

Separation of responsibilities
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One of the biggest challenges in a fast-growing company is that you’re in a constant mode of re-organization – or at least it feels like this way. People become teams, teams become departments. Roles and responsibilities are in constant flux and that in itself creates tension inside the organization as I wrote before.
 
Another aspect is how to structure you’re organization. When does a team becomes a team? What does that team do?
 
An important guideline for me is to create teams with opposing goals to create a healthy tension inside the organization with regard to how to reach particular strategic and tactical goals.
 
To give a simple example, Finance’s goal is to keep spending in check and within budgets while Engineering wants to hire more developers and increase spending on cloud services.
 
It’s healthy for any organization to have those discussions and it works better when those discussions are not a single person’s head. Everyone has bias and by separating responsibilities you can bring those decisions out in the open.
 
When you’re scaling your organization and thinking about organization structure, it is good to keep that goal in mind. Often it is not even about throwing more bodies towards a problem, but being smart about roles and responsibilities. Open discussion between teams with opposing goals often leads to better decision making. It forces each team to articulate and push for the best possible outcome.
 
The one thing you do have to watch out for are compromises for the sake of compromises. This a typical problem with large corporations where decisions by committee become the norm. This is a cultural problem and not an organizational one. Running a business involves a certain amount of risk-taking. Separation of responsibilities does not preclude risk-taking.

Dystopian futures

Social media justice

Social media justice
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The other day, I was watching The Orville on Hulu – great show. You could describe it as a funny Star Trek show. In episode 7 of season 1, they deal with a society with majority rule. In essence, your behavior and performance are constantly judged by everyone – both online and offline with buttons on your shirt. It created almost a Black Mirror-esque of dystopian future.

It reminded me of this TED talk (video below) by Jon Ronson called “how one tweet can ruin your life”. You could call it social media justice.

Recently, an opinion piece appeared on the NY Times called “the cruelty of the call-out culture“.

Sometimes it feels like we live in this future today and I’m not a fan. We’ve grown beyond lynching and public shaming and built a justice system with impartial justices who enforce the rule of law. We vote for representatives in our government to lay down those laws. It really wasn’t pretty in the Middle Ages.

I think the power of social media is around awareness and public debate. The #metoo “campaign” did its work and was great in surfacing and creating awareness around unethical behavior. Those are valuable contributions to society. Public lynching is not – the courts are a better venue for that.

 

Take a moment, recharge and move on

Celebrate little successes

Celebrate little successes
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When you are in the middle of a project or starting/growing a company, you are laser-focused on the end goal. Every step you take, every decision you make is aimed to get closer to that goal.

Often that goal is far away or yet so close but still out of grasp. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings as the colloquialism goes. There is much truth to that. I like to say it is more of a marathon than a sprint. If you go too fast or expect too much early on, you will run out of steam, stamina or breath.

A marathon is long though and most projects and companies take a lot longer to come to life. You need intermediate steps to assess if you are making progress or heading in the right direction.

But you also need to celebrate. You did the work and you accomplished something. It is a reason to celebrate.

Often we have a tendency to wait until “the money is in the bank”, but there is no fault in celebrating a little while keeping the eye on the target. There is really no reason to think you will jinx it by celebrating too soon. Celebrate your accomplishment. It does not matter how big or small. Just calibrate the celebration to the appropriate size of the accomplishment and you will be fine.

Everyone likes to hear praise they accomplishment, nobody dislikes a celebration – even small ones – to acknowledge that fact. Just take a moment, recharge and move on to the next thing. Try it.

Living in an AR world

Hyper-Reality

Hyper-Reality
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This video caught my eye this week. It’s a short film made by Keiichi Matsuda. He describes it as “Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media.”

I think the biggest innovation in the coming decade will come out of display technology. I don’t know how it’s going to look like – that’s like predicting the smartphone in 1990. We know where it’s heading, but do not know exactly how it’s going to look like. There’s certainly a lot of technology developed which is going to help shape that future. We have AR, VR, OLED (most notably flexible displays) and a slew of other more niche display tech like holographic displays, short throw projectors, and plasma emission displays.

The question is how we’re going to use that technology in the real world. This video is inspiring potential vision on how that future can look like. I’m taking an optimistic attitude even though it might look a bit overwhelming.

 

Keep your eyes on the prize

The road not taken

The road not taken
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A long time ago, I was chatting with an HR manager at Philips. He was a veteran. At the time Shapeways was a Philips venture and we were located on their campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

I asked him what in his opinion the biggest mistakes was people make in their careers.

His answer was foregoing opportunities because the opportunity did not fit the career path they set out for themselves.

Employees come in from college with a general idea on how to they want their career to progress and they are laser-focused on following that career path. In their minds it is the path which they laid out for themselves is the only way to get where they want to end up.

In reality this often not the case and the path is not always as linear as you think it is. According to the HR manager, it often led to people getting stuck in a position without a clear path forward. For instance, their business unit might be showing neutral growth or – worse – negative growth. In the past, they passed on lateral moves because they were not upward nor fitted the path they set out to walk on.

His advice was to always seize the opportunity. Opportunities often arise out of success. In his career, most successful careers were people who took every opportunity which was presented to them – lateral or not.

The lesson is that whatever you do, keep your goals in mind but don’t worry too much about the path.

Blockchain and crypto can be a solution

Decentralization to centralization

Decentralization to centralization
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This morning I was reading an article by Chris Dixon (VC at a16z) at Wired. I wholeheartedly agree with his reasoning. This is my take on it.

The basic internet technologies like HTTP (to run websites), TCP/IP (to let devices communicate between each other) and DNS (to map domain names to a server) are all open. It’s one of the major reasons the internet could grow as big as it did.

Most of the service layer of the internet like servers and routers, run open source software or are mostly built on of open source software. Android and many other devices out there run on Linux which is an open source kernel – the heart of the operating system.

But the application layer where we interact on the internet has gone closed. Platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are all closed. The push for the decentralization stems from this and the excitement around blockchain and crypto is because of the promise to open up these platforms.

The problem with these closed platforms is the arbitrary nature of governing of access to these platforms. I call it arbitrary not because there is no reason for the way they’re governed (mostly to maximize profit), but the effects the governing has on the users of those platforms.

Facebook has changed their strategy around the newsfeed a few times and the fall out among the business users was significant. Take for instance Zynga which went big on social gaming on Facebook and then Facebook decided to deprioritize social gaming in their feeds.

Amazon is battling with their marketplace suppliers on multiple fronts. One of them is the absorption of successful staple items into their AmazonBasics brand taking away market from their own suppliers. Also, they’re battling with fraudulent behavior on their platforms like fake reviews which lead to suspension and withholding of revenue. In turn that got weaponized where vendors leave fake reviews with competitors to push them out of the marketplace.

Google changes their search algorithm all the time. In Europe, they’ve been accused and fined for deprioritizing search results which compete with their own.

Apple has a tendency to do the same by leveraging to their platform to push their own services while making it hard or impossible for competitors to get access. The HomePod only supports Apple Music for now.

The problem is that these large platforms see the innovation happening on the edges of their platform and absorb them into their own business while pushing out existing companies. This makes perfect business sense but it also makes them unreliable business partners.

But most of all, it absolutely kills innovation. Why put effort into building and launching a successful new service when you can predict that in the future the internet giants will take it away. It’s not a premise for success and it’s hard to raise funding for that.

Blockchain and crypto might be a solution. Time will tell. As Chris Dixon writes, “It took twenty years for open source software to supplant proprietary software, and it could take just as long for open services to supplant proprietary services.” Regardless, this problem needs to be solved. Internet regulation is never fundamentally going to solve this problem, it just stems the tide.

The promise of decentralization makes the tech community including myself so excited about blockchain and crypto. It’ll free us from the grasp of these internet giants and let us innovate again.